faith

I had made a goal of 100 for the year of 2017 and have already reached it.

So I’m pretty excited about that.

Thank you to anyone who subbed through this blog. I’m hoping to do a 100 subscriber video in the near future. Maybe a Q&A or something, so if you have any ideas or any questions you’d like me to answer, please leave them in the comment section.

In this video I respond to a believer who says he knows the real reason why atheists don’t believe in his god. I hope you enjoy it.

Found a video made by a pastor who says that atheists are just unreasonable bigots in the title. He doesn’t do much to back his claim on the ‘bigot’ portion but he did try to provide evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.

During my childhood, my parents were very involved with the church. I went to church every Sunday and helped clean the church during the week. I went to Sunday school, and this is where the trouble began as far as my faith is concerned.

My father loved to read and he often bought National Geographic magazines and I would read them after he was finished. These magazines clashed with a lot of what my Sunday school teachers were feeding me.

I remember them telling me that believing in Jesus was the most important factor when it came to being saved. The problem for me was geography and time periods – how could the Native Americans know of Jesus, for example, when Europeans hadn’t yet discovered North America? How could isolated tribes, which I’d read about in…

Today I read a religious post titled, Hate The Religion, Love The Believer. It’s a post basically exploring whether you can hate the religious belief and still love the person. So I thought I’d take a whack at it.

The post started off with that meme and asked whether that’s a reasonable position for an atheist or secularist to take.

Atheists have often argued that the Christian slogan to “hate the sin, but love the sinner” is tantamount to their claim to oppose religion but love religious people. However, I think this would not sit well with me (and many people of faith) because we DEFINE ourselves by our faith, whereas sinners do not define themselves by their sin.

For many devout Christians, she’s right in that they tend to define themselves by their religion. I think that’s why many religious people get offended when an atheist mocks or questions that religion – to them it isn’t just an idea but a part of them.

However, people can define themselves by other ideologies.

For example, for some people their political identity is extremely important to them. Could you love an ardent socialist, communist, Democrat or Republican even if you disagree with their political stances?

I think it fairly obvious that you can.

Actually, I can think of only one type of sinner that defines themselves by their sin, being homosexuals. So to hate their sin is (to them) equivalent to hating them, the same way Christians feel an attack on their Christian liberties is an attack on them as individuals (as citizens and as humans).

You are trying to conflate a belief with biology. It would be like me trying to equate religious belief with heterosexuality – one is a belief and one is my inherent sexual orientation.

I used to be religious but then I lost my faith. I’m never going to wake up in the morning and find myself sexually attracted to men.

Can you think of other sinners that define themselves by their sin? Maybe Nazis or the KKK, who define themselves by their hatred and superior feelings against people of colour. If we hate their sin, can we claim to still love them?

Of course you can and this is a more accurate comparison.

Do you really believe that Nazi’s, Neo-Nazi’s or ardent racists don’t have family members who hate that they think that way but love them nevertheless?

Prisons are full of murderers, rapists and criminals who have loving relationships with spouses or other family members. Some of them are racists and Nazi’s.

She basically confirms this is so in this sentence:

Yeah, and plenty of atheists love their parents, even though they tried to indoctrinate them with hateful religious ideologies, such as the hell doctrine or that homosexuals are abominations or that they are responsible for the sins of their ancestors etc.

She continues with:

You are more than just your religious beliefs. I am more than my political beliefs. People are complex beings and can disagree on a whole host of subjects and still agree on others. We can love and enjoy people we fundamentally disagree with because that isn’t the only thing that defines them.

In fact, I think you can find some of that being proven right here on this blog. There are comments by people on here who I would enthusiastically disagree with on religious matters, but I agree with on other subjects. I can enjoy conversing with them about everything, including their belief in a deity.

A Rabbi who I used to have spirited religious discussions with used to tell me that we should focus on what we have in common, rather than our differences, and that if we did, we’d likely find we have far more in common than we have differences.

I think there was a lot of truth in that.

But regardless, I think you can definitely hate or oppose the religious ideologies someone holds but still love the person.

The appropriately named ‘Non Sit Peccatum’ (or ‘not a sin’ in Latin) was subjected to protests after shop owner Hector Valdivielso commissioned the images, which were displayed in the window.

As a result, he’s been (allegedly) threatened:

The shop owner took to Facebook to express his opinion, stating, “A man with his wife ordered me to remove the offending scene and said that if I didn’t he would remove it himself.”

Personally, I’m always wary when someone says they’ve been threatened but doesn’t have any more proof than their word. We’ve seen how this sort of accusation can turn out to be a hoax after the American election, where crybabies were falsely accusing others of hate crimes that didn’t take place.

The store owner did post a letter he says he received as a result of the dildo Nativity scene:

Valdivielso also posted an image of a hate letter he received, which read: “Don’t you have the balls to display something that would offend Muslims? Of course not, because they would blow you up.”

He has since taken the display down, and started asking people to vote online about whether the display should go back up, which smacks of a publicity campaign.

But I do have to admit that the story made me chuckle when I first read it, and I absolutely think he should be allowed to put up the display.

However, I can certainly understand when people make the argument that it’s in poor taste.

This is a post by a religious blogger who approached me about answering a few questions from my own atheist perspective. They were:

What is the meaning of life? Is there an afterlife? If so, how do you get there?

The last question I answered with a Carl Sagan quote. I’m going to disable comments here but I hope you’ll consider stopping by their blog and commenting on the post or adding your own perspective on those questions.

I am branching out the scope of my theological material. As a devout Christian, it can be limited but I will remain objective for this post when it comes to who is right or wrong. I want my viewers to get a glimpse of the basicsimilarities and critical differences of people that are affiliated with a wide range of religions or simply do not affiliate. This is simply a snapshot that encompasses the views of 6 billion people. For each religion, I surveyed a person affiliated with that religion. I asked three questions in this order: What is the meaning of life? Is there an afterlife? If so, how do you get there? Here we go ladies and gentlemen:

Christian

As Christians we are meant to serve and glorify God. We are to love God and other people

So I wrote a post the other day about the Knightstown Christmas tree cross, which was taken down after the ACLU filed a lawsuit against it on behalf of a resident.

Anyhow, the video I first watched was by Anthony Brian Logan, and I decided to make a response video about the tree as well as Anthony’s comments in that video. So I hope you’ll give it a watch and let me know what you think.

It’s unlikely that someone like Anthony with his approximately 80,000 subscribers will see my video, but I thought it would be fun and help me get a handle on creating these types of videos.

Oh, and I got a little carried away with the editing. I was messing about, trying to figure out some things and decided it would be fun to make a Christmas themed video.